Listen to Carla Morrison

On her new album, “Amor Supremo,” the Mexican singer-songwriter Carla Morrison draws on influences ranging from Hans Zimmer to Britpop.

Photograph by Maureen Evans

Carla Morrison is a twenty-nine-year-old singer-songwriter who lives in Mexico City. She sings in Spanish, and so isn’t well-known in the United States. In Mexico, though, she’s a star, with two Latin Grammys and a gold-certified album, “Déjenme Llorar” (“Let Me Cry”). She fills festival tents with her lilting, acoustic songs about love gone wrong. “Let me cry alone, I want to get this off my chest,” she sings, during the chorus of “Déjenme Llorar.” There’s humility to her heartbreak—a lightness to her sadness that makes it magnetic.

Or, at least, that’s how it used to be—recently, Morrison’s music has changed in a thrilling way. The first sign of transformation was the Wagnerian title of her new album, “Amor Supremo”; the second was the drama of its first single, “Un Beso” (“A Kiss”). The drums sound like Joy Division’s, and there’s church organ instead of guitar; Morrison’s voice has the desperate grandeur associated with Robert Smith or Björk. She seems to have become a different person. During the chorus, she makes a predatory promise: “Yo te voy a robar / Te voy a secuestrar / . . . Un beso” (“I’m going to steal from you / I’m going to kidnap from you / . . . a kiss”). The obvious comparison is to Lana Del Rey, but Morrison is not performing a persona. She’s the genuine article—a doomed, spectral torch singer, incandescent with longing, desire, and grief.

Recently, I spoke with Morrison on the phone. She grew up in Mexico, on the border, in Tecate, Baja California. When she was seventeen, she moved to Phoenix to study music and joined the indie scene there. Four years later, she moved to Mexico City and began recording by herself. Mexico City, she said, “is very rock and roll. But, in the north part of Mexico, we’re very gloomy. We love Coldplay, Britpop, Oasis, the Cure, Joy Division.” She grew up listening to Patsy Cline and loves Morrissey. If you want to imagine her voice, “Patsy Cline plus Morrissey in Spanish” is not far off the mark. (If that sounds like a great combination, it is.)

Morrison said that she wanted to “do something more international” with “Amor Supremo.” “We, as Mexicans, or Latin Americans, are always being inspired by these international artists. I thought, Why shouldn’t we try something like that, too?” She set up a studio in a house on the beach in Tijuana, and brought along producers who could give her songs a different sound. “A big influence on the record was the movie ‘Interstellar,’ ” she said, laughing. “We watched it, like, probably four times—we were like, ‘WOW. THIS IS AMAZING!’ And we listened to the soundtrack. We wanted to make these very emotional, heartbroken love songs feel huge, and for the music to make you feel things in your body.” You can hear echoes of Hans Zimmer’s sci-fi soundtrack in the keening, pulsing synths of “Tierra Ajena” (“Strange Land”).

“I think that, with my other records, I was still discovering myself as an artist,” Morrison said. “I had forgotten completely about my personality, and about who I am as a woman. Lately, I’ve changed. I wanted to show people that I wasn’t the same Carla as before. I’ve always felt very normal. I’m from a normal town—a small, small, small town. I’ve always perceived music in a very normal way. I don’t judge, but I create. I used to sound more like a little girl, maybe, but, on this album, I feel more profound within myself.” She seemed to be mulling over, in silence, the question of how the winsome, wounded Carla of “Let Me Cry” was related to the ardent, tidal Carla of “Amor Supremo.” My own sense is that she’s already explained her transformation, in a song called “Todo Pasa” (“Everything Passes”). “Mi mente no deja de correr,” she sings. “Debo escabar mis adentros.” “My mind can’t stop running . . . . I’ll search out what’s inside of me.”

Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, has been a writer and an editor at the magazine since 2012.

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